4 Pathways to a Culturally Responsive Classroom

Language and culture are often implicitly woven together in language classrooms and it’s easy to get caught up in teaching mainstream culture. But what does this do to learners’ own cultural identities and development, particularly for younger learners? How can educators honour the cultures that are in the classroom while recognizing the new culture that is being learned and formed together? What does it look like to be culturally responsive with learners trying to learn a new language?

Elementary educator Judie Haynes suggests 4 Pathways to a Culturally Responsive Classroom with tips for teaching to your language learners’ unique cultural strengths. The article contains links to other resources to support creating a culturally responsive environment and can be adapted to adult learner contexts as well.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About clwoelk

Cheryl Woelk is coordinator of Language for Peace and specializes in language and peace education in multicultural contexts. She holds an MA in Education and a graduate certificate in Peacebuilding from Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA. Cheryl currently lives in Saskatchewan, Canada with her spouse and son.

Discussion

2 thoughts on “4 Pathways to a Culturally Responsive Classroom”

I followed one of the links on that page to a great article about with ELL from a Chinese language background, which had some similarities to my student and their families in Korea. I especially loved the tip about using math word problems to help kids encounter academic English in a subject field they might be more comfortable with. Then I thought about riddles too…that might also be a fun way to get students thinking carefully about meaning and understanding. Maybe I will look for some resources related to that!

Contributing Author

Cheryl Woelk is coordinator of Language for Peace and specializes in language and peace education in multicultural contexts. She holds an MA in Education and a graduate certificate in Peacebuilding from Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA. Cheryl currently lives in Saskatchewan, Canada with her spouse and son.

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.